Internet Reasoning Service fact-file

What's the Problem?

• How can we support intelligent discovery, composition, and rapid prototyping of distributed applications built out of problem solving components on the web?
• How can we support easy publication of problem solving components on the web?
• How can we provide interoperability among heterogeneous, web accessible components (e.g., Lisp and Java)?

Towards a solution

The first version of the Internet Reasoning Service, IRS-I, focused on providing interactive facilities for users to locate, configure and execute distributed applications, specified according to the UPML modeling framework. This distinguishes between Task, (what needs to be achieved), Problem Solving Methods (how to achieve it) and Domain (where the chosen functionality is applied) components.

The second version, IRS-II, provides four main functionalities:

1. It allows the semantic specification of dynamic problem solving components implemented on different software platforms.
2. It provides a number of publishing platforms (currently Java and Lisp), which provide semantic specification and registering mechanisms so that service providers can implement IRS specifications and make them available on the web to clients and other publishers.
3. It provides a simple API that clients can use to build applications which make use of IRS-compliant web services.
4. It provides a broker which is able to answer requests such as "Achieve-Task" from clients, locate the appropriate problem solving components, remotely invoke the relevant implementations, and return the results to the client

In what follows we show snapshots of the IRS-I user interface as well as the architecture, client interface, and java publisher interface of the IRS-II.

Take a Guided Tour

A QuickTime movie will soon be added here to illustrate the IRS in action.

Try a Demonstration

Version 2.0 will be released soon. Watch this space!

Technical requirements:

Windows 98, 2000, XP, Java Runtime Environment 1.4

Example Applications

The Patient Shipping Scenario illustrates how IRS-II can be used to develop applications in terms of a number of co-operating, distributed semantic web services.

In this scenario, patients are diagnosed with some medical condition, such as severe osteoarthritis, which may require surgery, for instance, hip replacement. A number of hospitals in different nations may provide hip replacement services and, as indeed is the case in the UK National Health-Care Service, patients may then be sent abroad for treatment. This problem can be represented as a distributed application, in which different problem solving components are published on the web - e.g., diagnostic, therapeutic, scheduling components, hospital yellow pages, ambulance providers, etc., and the IRS client API is then used to invoke and integrate all these services, using the abstract, capability-driven invocation methods provided by the IRS.

Further Reading

Crubezy, M., Motta, E., Lu, W., and Musen, M. (2002). Configuring Online Problem Solving Resources with the Internet Reasoning Service. Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Information Processing (IIP-2002), stream 8 of the 17th IFIP World Computer Congress. Montreal, 25-29 August 2002.

Fensel, D. and Motta, E. (2001). Structured Development of Problem Solving Methods, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 13, pp. 913-932, 2001.

Motta, E. (1999). Reusable Components for Knowledge, IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Semantic representation

View in the AKT Triplestore Browser or as RDF.

Also available in DOAP RDF (Description Of A Project)